israel-palestine

"It is like two people arguing over a slice of pizza while one of them is eating it," said Muasher, vice-president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace

maktoob, almost

i like to think that everything happens for a reason, considering that there are trillions of possibilities; and when you map out a tree with the different permutations, the number goes into infinity.

there's a reason for why you are where you are when you are. trillions of pieces react and settle into place paving the way for what comes next.

it's been a tough past year and i've dealt with deluge after deluge of frustration. to top it off, my new laptop completely crashed leaving me sans 4 months of data, which i failed to back up.

earlier today, i prematurely (conclusively, at the time) arrived at the decision that i'd like my moniker to be 'the steamroller.' i can be incredibly demanding, but fairly few - fewer than half a dozen - people have ever really seen me irate. i thought, for the sake of performance and accomplishment, why hold back?

i picked up my laptop 6 hours ago from the fedex office and have been working since.

some random thought triggered by spontaneous nerve firings led me to google something which led to something else which led me to a door: om mani padme hum.

and so here i am thinking that i need to not be a steamroller, to look deeper and seek enlightenment.

the universe is either trying to tell me something or i'm reading too far into this.

burnt out

so i purchased a new laptop 4 months ago and i just burned out the hard drive, and this one was the first solid state.

seeing as how i'm coming up on the dozenth drive, i need something that can keep up.

anyway, i tried like hell to recover all data and came up on some great resources.

first, i didn't have an optical drive so i had to make all my files usb bootable.

utility	score	comments
Rufus	5/5	Rufus will make a properly bootable USB drive given that you have a proper Windows based ISO file.
HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool	1/5	Not much better than your built in Windows format tool.
ISO to USB	1/5	Finicky tool; constant error messages. Used Rufus, and was done in no time at all.
Win32 Disk Imager	4/5	This only gets a 4 out of 5 because it does what it's supposed to well: slapping ISOs onto removable drives. I used this for putting Debian Wheezy onto a SD card for the Raspberry Pi and it worked like a charm.

as for the recovery utilities, look no further than UBCD. UBCD is a DOS wizard and contains just about every utility you need from TestDisk to Parted Magic. it includes BIOS, CPU, boot management, data recovery, device info and management, diagnosis, disk cloning, disk editing, disk wiping, installation, partition management, memory, peripheral, and system utilities.

try it; trust me. i bet geek squad, ontrack, and even nerd herd uses it.

nintendo child

so my brand new acer aspire s3 crashed on me.  i put it in hibernate as always, but this time, when i opened it, i had a conniption and started overusing commas.

but really, it rebooted and posted an ominous message: no bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key.  odd considering it's a solid state drive and the only moving part is the fan.

i started troubleshooting and dismantled the whole laptop.

shortly thereafter, i started bugging brian, my other half.

Brian:  oh ohhh ohhh did you try blowing into the ssd nintendo style?

 me:  lol i totally did

 Brian:  hahahahah

 me:  that's how you know i'm an 80s kid

 Brian:  hahaha

brain

this is what my brain does with most decisions, except with more branches and subbranches.  permutation after permutation.  i should get the windows or mac thinking/processing symbol tattooed on my forehead.

Today, I am grateful

that my generation has not had a mandatory draft.